In what city did Atwood begin writing the manuscript in spring 1984?

Margaret Atwood began writing The Handmaid’s Tale in West Berlin in spring 1984.

She was living in the divided city when she started the novel, using a German typewriter. West Berlin was then an enclave surrounded by East Germany and encircled by the Berlin Wall, a setting that helped give the project an atmosphere of surveillance, ideological conflict, and political unease.

Atwood’s idea for the book had developed before the actual drafting began. She wanted to imagine a totalitarian theocracy built from practices and beliefs that already existed somewhere in history, rather than inventing an entirely unfamiliar form of oppression.

The novel was not finished in Berlin. Atwood later completed it in Alabama, and McClelland & Stewart published it in 1985. The city is sometimes confused with Cambridge, where Atwood studied at Harvard, but Cambridge was part of her earlier academic life, not the manuscript’s starting point.